Oral evidence - College of Policing

Home Affairs Committee

Oral evidence: College of Policing, HC 23
Tuesday 24 May 2016

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 24 Tuesday 2016.

Members present: Keith Vaz (Chair); Victoria Atkins; James Berry; Mr David Burrowes; Nusrat Ghani; Tim Loughton; Stuart C. McDonald; Mr David Winnick

Questions 205–268

Witness[es]: Chief Constable Phil Gormley QPM, Police Scotland, gave evidence.

Chair: I refer everyone to the register of Members’ interests, where the interests of Committee members are noted.

James Berry: Before my election as an MP, in my work as an independent barrister I was involved in cases involving the City of London police and Chief Constable Gormley, prior to his current role.

Q205 Chair: I welcome Chief Constable Gormley to this one-off sitting. It will not be the practice of this Committee to ask the chief constable of Police Scotland to come on a regular basis, but we are most grateful to you. I know it has been quite difficult to arrange things, and you need to be back in Scotland for an event later on, so we are very grateful to you for coming down here.

Our primary interest in having you here, chief constable, is to look at the comparison between the single police service in Scotland and the multiple services in England and Wales, especially with respect to our inquiry into the College of Policing, which is about to conclude. Before your appointment, there were concerns about the ways in which Police Scotland was being run—general concerns; I am not saying individual concerns, or regarding individual people. There was the example of a couple dying after remaining unconscious by a motorway for three days after an emergency call had been made. There were concerns about the excessive use of stop-and-search tactics, and about illegal monitoring of journalists’ communications and contacts. You arrived—were you surprised, being an Englishman, at being appointed to a top job in policing in Scotland?

Chief Constable Gormley: I wasn’t surprised, because I applied! Sorry. No, in short. As you might expect, Chair, I had done a bit of due diligence on the winnability of this, and I was convinced that it was an open and transparent process. It was a professional and personal challenge that I wanted to throw myself into, and I am delighted that I was selected.

Q206 Chair: Of course. It is unusual, is it not, to have an Englishman right at the top of the Scottish police service?

Chief Constable Gormley: The Scottish police service has been operating as a national service for three years. In terms of the history of the precursor constabularies and police forces, I do not know that intimately, but I suspect that there have been English chiefs. Certainly a lot of Scottish senior officers have made very valuable contributions to policing in England and Wales over the years. I guess it is probably less usual for an Englishman to go north than it is for a Scotsman or woman to come south.

Q207 Chair: Of course the best person got appointed.

Chief Constable Gormley: Others will be the judge of that.

Q208 Chair: Let us look at the main differences from your last job as chief constable of Norfolk. I am not going to refer to your role in SOCA until a little later, when we talk about the proceeds of crime, but Norfolk was your last territorial job. Then you have moved over to Scotland, where you have one force. What are the main differences between how we do things in England and Wales and what happens in Scotland, where you have one force and one chief constable, rather than the 43 we have in England and Wales?

Chief Constable Gormley: There are a number of differences, the first of which are the accountability structures. In England and Wales, obviously, there are now police and crime commissioners, so there is a direct, politically elected accountability mechanism for chief constables. As I was exiting Norfolk, that was just coming in, so I did not operate for very long under that, but that is one principal difference. The police authority in Scotland is a bit more like a police authority used to be in England and Wales, although it is different in the sense that every member is appointed, so there are accountability differences.

I guess that, operationally and organisationally, the fact that we are a national force brings real advantages in terms of scale, capacity and capability to our ability to protect the people of Scotland from some of the most serious threats: cyber, CT and organised crime. We have that at our fingertips and we have the Scottish crime campus at Gartcosh where those capabilities are brigaded and organised.

We also have the opportunity to have really local policing and the challenge for us as a national service is to make sure that what we deliver locally is recognised and relevant to the community, because what has struck me—I knew it theoretically—is that the diversity of the communities of Scotland is vast, as is the geography. On some of the islands, police, fire and coastguard services are provided entirely by volunteers.

Q209 Chair: Sure. We will come to all those specialist services. Having gone up to Scotland and operated one force, are you now in favour of more mergers in England and Wales? Do you think it is justifiable to have such small forces as exist in parts of England?

Chief Constable Gormley: That’s a really difficult question for me to answer in some respects. What we have in Scotland works for Scotland. Some people are still sceptical and I think that is principally about a national organisation’s ability to deliver locally, but I am genuinely confident that we can deal with that.

As we move forward, there is a range of ways in which—

Q210 Chair: What about mergers? Let me take you back to that. You have experienced Norfolk. You know that there are very small forces in England and Wales, and very big forces like the Metropolitan police and West Midlands, where you have served during your career. Do you think collaboration is enough now or that we should have much bigger policing bodies, such as the one we have in Scotland, which can deliver all the specialist services so effectively?

Chief Constable Gormley: One of the reasons I went to Scotland was because I believe that model is better suited now. That is my personal view. There are other ways in which to try to address the challenges and what we see emerging south of the border around regional responses is a way through that, but I think forces like the one I was proud to lead—Norfolk—will struggle to develop the sort of capability and capacity we need to protect people from some of the emerging threats, particularly those that are technology based. There is a range of ways in which to approach that. Bigger forces doing everything is one approach. You can also develop what I think has historically been called the laminated approach when local forces deal with local policing issues, and there is a regional or multi-force overlay that deals with some of the cyber and other crime threats that are no respecters of geography. The regional organised crime units are a response to that, as are the counter-terrorism units. There are two models. They both have strengths and challenges, and the Scottish one is the one that I have chosen to operate in.

Q211 Chair: Sure, but you are managing a very large geographical area. I visited you in Tulliallan. It is hardly the centre of Scotland. It is quite a quiet place, isn’t it? It certainly was when I visited it.

Chief Constable Gormley: But it was late on a Friday, Chair. It is, but—

Chair: How do you keep in touch with, say, what is happening in Ross, Cromarty and Skye, or other parts of Scotland? How do you keep in touch with local policing? Is it through your commanders?

Chief Constable Gormley: We have divisional commanders and chief superintendents. In the chief officer team, there are seven assistant chief constables and, as I sit here, three deputy chief constables, who have both territorial and functional responsibilities. In terms of the geography, I have assistant chief constables for the north, the east and the west, and they have a number of chief superintendents who are the face of local policing.

This is the journey we are on. We must be clear about what we need to retain a very central grip on and control over some of those national capabilities and where, as we develop, mature and embed the Police Scotland model, we can operate greater discretion locally.

Q212 Nusrat Ghani: Chief Constable Gormley, there is a lot of coverage in the news at the moment about the lack of firearms officers in England and Wales. They are at the lowest level for decades, something the chair of the Police Federation attributes to a lack of support for officers who have had to discharge their weapons. Is this something you recognise and are you satisfied there are sufficient firearms officers in Scotland?

Chief Constable Gormley: I recognise the description. We work with—I have worked historically very closely with—Simon Chesterman, who leads for the National Police Chiefs Council on matters involving firearms officers. The Police Federation and the national Firearms Officers Association have publicly expressed concerns about the way they are treated should they discharge their weapons. I think that debate principally centres on whether they regard themselves as being treated as suspects or as professional witnesses. I think that does have a direct correlation in terms of their willingness to step forward and volunteer.

I think the reduction in numbers is probably—forgive me; I am no longer all over the English and Welsh figures, as you would understand—principally around the merging of various units, so the sorts of regional arrangements that I alluded to in answering the Chairman’s questions are some of the reasons why the numbers have been reduced. Budgets have required some hard decisions to be made, so you are seeing, I think, forces entering collaborative arrangements with neighbouring forces that are designed to produce a more efficient and effective response.

In terms of Scotland, of course we have been watching very carefully, and we are very closely aligned to the developments in England and Wales, because actually we need to be able to support colleagues in England and Wales, and we may need support from them, so both in terms of how we operationally deploy our tactics, our techniques and the equipment, they are interoperable. We have been looking at the capacity that we have—the numbers of officers—over the last few weeks and months, and also their tactical capability and the development of that. I am in conversation with the Cabinet Secretary on Thursday in terms of how we take this forward to the next step, but what I would say is that it is pretty seamless in terms of the interoperability, and the capability of Scotland and England and Wales to work together.

Q213 Nusrat Ghani: Can I just ask a supplementary? Does that mean that enough officers do come forward to train to become officers who will want to discharge their weapons? Is there an issue that they don’t want to come forward for the training because they don’t want to be in a position ever to discharge their weapons?

Chief Constable Gormley: What I have not experienced so far in Scotland is an issue around that, but colleagues in England and Wales have articulated that view, and certainly it is the federation’s view. I don’t have the evidence to support that. I certainly, in conversation with officers, know that there is a concern for them and their families, because at the moment every officer who carries a firearm is a volunteer, and if they feel that they are particularly vulnerable and their family is vulnerable should they use that weapon, that is the issue that is exercising them, and I do understand that.

Q214 Chair: I was talking to one of my colleagues from Scotland who has been elected to Westminster, and they said if they did it again, they would probably have had a Select Committee that would hold you to account, as the chief constable, that was based in the Scottish Parliament. Who do you regard as your go-to politician if you need to ask for political direction or clarification? You don’t have a police and crime commissioner up there, so who do you go to? Do you go to the First Minister? Do you go to the Justice Minister?

Chief Constable Gormley: It is a tripartite arrangement. I am accountable to the Scottish Police Authority, the chairman of which is Andrew Flanagan. He appointed me; he chaired the selection process. I account to him through a range of mechanisms—committees, audit and risk, and monthly meetings held in public. There is a direct accountability mechanism that looks quite similar to the arrangements that used to exist with police authorities in England and Wales.

Q215 Chair: But do you think the Scottish Parliament ought to have had a Select Committee designed specifically to hold Police Scotland to account?

Chief Constable Gormley: Well, there is, in that respect. In terms of the constitutional detail, I am probably not equipped to deal with that specifically, but there is the Justice Committee and a Policing Sub-Committee of that Committee. In the four months I have been there, I have appeared before the Public Audit Committee, the Justice Committee and the Policing Sub-Committee, and I have also appeared before the police authority on three occasions.

Chair: So enough Committees.

Chief Constable Gormley: It doesn’t feel like I am unaccountable. Others may have a view, but actually I spend a lot of my time, quite legitimately, explaining—hopefully satisfactorily explaining—policing in Scotland.

Q216 Stuart C. McDonald: As you will have gathered from the Chairman’s Friday night visit, we are interested in the Police College at Tulliallan. Can you tell us a little bit about the role of the college, particularly in terms of recruitment and the initial training of police officers in Scotland?

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes, I think it is a real jewel in Police Scotland’s crown. Every police officer in Scotland, whichever force they previously went through, was trained through Tulliallan, so all our recruits undergo their basic training there. That has a number of advantages for us. It means we can ensure consistency of standards of training. We are really clear about what we expect from people in terms of setting standards of behaviour and ethics, and how we expect our officers to interact with members of the public and colleagues. It is easier, because actually we have got one place where they go, and it provides a centre of gravity, in my view, around the whole organisation. One of the issues, understandably, as Police Scotland was formed was that people had great respect and affection for the forces that they originally joined. One of the common issues that unites everybody is that they all went to Tulliallan. We do training elsewhere. Some of it is locally delivered, but it is overseen by our training department, based at Tulliallan, and we do some training with English and Welsh colleagues south of the border, but Tulliallan trains every single police officer in Scotland. I am not saying that that could be replicated south of the border. You know Scotland far better than I do, but it is of a scale and size whereby we can do that, and there are some real advantages, in my view, from that.

Q217 Stuart C. McDonald: So would you recommend that model for England, or something similar?

Chief Constable Gormley: I’m not sure I could do that. For Scotland, it works. It is a population of about 5 million, and we have 17,234 police officers. It is manageable and it works, but you can scale that up to an English and Welsh context, with 60-plus million citizens and a police service of—I don’t know what it is at the moment, but north of 120,000. With that geographic spread, and 43 different forces and 43 police and crime commissioners, it is a more complex environment. Certainly I don’t see how you could ever have one physical college.

Q218 Stuart C. McDonald: In terms of police colleges in England, what do you think the College of Policing and individual police forces need to do to improve recognition among police officers?

Chief Constable Gormley: Do you mean their recognition of the college itself?

Stuart C. McDonald: Yes.

Chief Constable Gormley: I guess generally that’s a question for Alex Marshall, whom I have great professional respect for, to address himself to. For any central function, be it the Police College at Tulliallan or the College of Policing, it has to be relevant. People have to recognise that it’s of worth and that the training and input that it gives help them in their professional—and, sometimes, their personal—lives. Credibility and relevance are the most important aspects of any training regime.

Q219 Chair: But you have a different system, do you not, in Scotland? There, police officers are automatically members of the college—

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes.

Chair: Whereas in England and Wales they have to actually join the College of Policing and, as we have heard from Alex Marshall, it is tough to get people to join. We have only to go round the Palace of Westminster and ask, “Do you know what the College of Policing is?” The situation has got better in the last year and a half, but everyone has to join yours, don’t they?

Chief Constable Gormley: They are not really members, if I may say so. Tulliallan, the Police College, is part of Police Scotland, so by dint of being a police officer or a police staff member of Police Scotland, that is your training establishment. It is set up in a different way. Whereas the College of Policing is a separate, stand-alone organisation, with its own chief executive and chairman and its own legislative framework around it, the college in Scotland is part of Police Scotland. I am both the chief constable of Police Scotland and ultimately responsible for the college. That is very different from the relationship between Alex and any individual chief constable.

Q220 Chair: But you can cope with both those jobs pretty well.

Chief Constable Gormley: With the right support and guidance around me, yes.

Q221 Chair: Do you think that model is one that needs to be looked at?

Chief Constable Gormley: Again, I go back to my earlier answer. This is the point about scale. In Scotland, we can do it. I know you have taken evidence from the commissioner. I was a police cadet when God was a boy or a girl and I remember going to Hendon. The Metropolitan police had Hendon and, from where I sat as a 16-year-old cadet, that seemed to work in terms of us training an establishment for London. Tulliallan works for Scotland in the present day. I think it would be a very significant challenge—I am not sure how it would be achievable—to have one college that did all the training.

Q222 Chair: But you could have one set of standards that was delivered locally.

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes, you could.

Chair: There is nothing wrong with that.

Chief Constable Gormley: No, there isn’t.

Q223 Chair: You’re talking physically, about something like the “Police Academy” of Hollywood, where people go in, graduate from the police academy, throw all their hats up in the air—if it’s still legal to do that in this country—and then they graduate as police officers. You like the ethos of consistency; everyone having the same standards.

Chief Constable Gormley: What I have seen at Tulliallan, which I think is a great advantage for Police Scotland, and which I don’t think it would be easy or even possible to replicate south of the border, not instinctively anyway, is the ability to bring people together. It doesn’t matter where they are going to serve across what is a very diverse and big geographic area; they get a real sense of what we as an organisation want and our values. We are able to train them to a very high standard. They have a passing-out parade. I was presiding officer at one about six weeks ago. There were 72 officers and there must have been 300 or 400 members of their families and friends who had come to support them. It is a really uplifting experience. They walk out of that college with immense pride and confidence, and their families feel part of it, because of course policing makes enormous demands on officers’ families and friends. That point where you can demonstrate that these individuals matter to us as an organisation, and that you matter to us as family and friends who are going to have to support them through their career, is really important. What struck me was that there were two young men graduating from our college six or eight weeks ago. They both had grandfathers who had come to see them who had finished serving 30-odd years ago. It creates a sense of identity, family and affection for an institution for which we ask people to go an extra mile. We rely on discretionary effort. All that builds a sense of purpose for me.

Chair: Thank you.

Q224 Mr Burrowes: Do you see policing as a profession?

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes.

Q225 Mr Burrowes: How do you see that shown? Do you see a role for the College of Policing’s model of qualification: the Policing Education Qualifications Framework?

Chief Constable Gormley: We have a different system in Scotland. Every probationary officer who passes out of the Police College at Tulliallan has a certificate in policing. The qualification to become promoted in Scotland is to go on and build that into a diploma. So there is a fundamentally different approach to how people go through those first two stages of promotion. Whereas in England and Wales, unless it has changed since I last looked, it is the OSPRE examination for constable to sergeant and sergeant to inspector. We have a different model in Scotland that builds not just in terms of law, but in terms of broader management decisions relevant to the level of the organisation they operate in. We are different and actually the models are not transferable, which is interesting. As we go forward—

Q226 Mr Burrowes: I appreciate the diploma approach, but what about going to one of the Scottish universities and getting a degree-level qualification. Do you see any merits in that?

Chief Constable Gormley: I do, but not as the exclusive routine. A piece of work was started before I joined called “Pathways to Policing” in Scotland. There are three broad routes. One is the traditional entry route, which is 11 weeks’ probationary training. The second is to fast track that for special constables who clearly have a range of experiences and knowledge that enables them to move more quickly through. The third piece that we are in consultation around, I think with Stirling University—it might be Dundee, but it is one of the Scottish universities—is around how we build that degree-level entry.

Something like one third of our applicants or entrants already have a first degree, so we are not short of people with degree-level qualifications who want to join policing. I think there is something about how we accredit their learning and how that is transferable. For me, with the approach around probationary training where they get a certificate, and if they are a supervisor or want to qualify to become a supervisor, they need to get a diploma, that is a transferable, recognised qualification that can be taken outside.

Q227 Mr Burrowes: How closely does Police Scotland work with the higher education sector in relation to accreditation in terms of research and development?

Chief Constable Gormley: Both those qualifications are accredited. There is the Scottish Institute for Policing Research—I hope I have got that right; forgive me after four months. We work with the Scottish universities on trying to develop an evidence base. There was certainly a review of governance. The police authority launched and has just published a governance review. One of the key stakeholders around that was the educational institutions in Scotland, in terms of helping us to understand some of what was termed the democratic deficit issues around a national model vis-à-vis a locally delivered one. There is a good relationship with many of the academic institutions in Scotland.

Q228 Chair: The Scotsman reported in February that Police Scotland was in talks with a number of Scottish universities about creating bespoke policing courses. Is that correct? Do you want to see a bigger role for Scottish universities in providing these kinds of courses?

Chief Constable Gormley: I don’t recall the direct quote, but I think that is what I was alluding to in terms of the three routes in. The traditional route, the route that involves accrediting special constables, and then working with a more academic route in that would need to be—

Q229 Chair: So you are in discussions with universities?

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes, we are.

Q230 Chair: And when do you think they will come to fruition. It is a good idea and one that we have supported in the past that the universities and colleges ought to be involved in this process; it should not all be done by serving police officers. When do you think you will conclude this?

Chief Constable Gormley: The short answer is that I don’t know. I don’t anticipate that it will be very long, but I’m very happy to write back to you with the timelines around that. My understanding is that it’s at a fairly advanced stage because we are able to describe in detail what that will look like—or others are—around that piece of work, which is due to come back to my executive team in the next few months.

Q231 Chair: Sure. Just one other thing about procurement: compared to Norfolk, is it easier to procure for a larger number of people, rather than having to collaborate or have discussions with 43 other colleagues?

Chief Constable Gormley: What I would say, first of all, is that I am not an expert on procurement, but in terms of—

Q232 Chair: But you have saved some money since you got there, presumably?

Chief Constable Gormley: Well, we have economies of scale because we are an organisation of 23,000 and Norfolk was an organisation of 3,000, so our ability to access better deals is theoretically there. We use both UK and Scottish Government national frameworks where appropriate—that is particularly the case around ICT. On the broader corporate procurement, if there is an available framework we will use it, because that is when you get those economics of scale. Sometimes in the corporate world, because of the nature of what we are looking for, we have to go out on our own. What we do have, because it is one service, is one fleet, one uniform, one—

Q233 Chair: So a police officer in a police car in Falkirk is driving the same make of car as a police officer in Kirkcaldy or Livingston.

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes, well—I hesitate—they will be brought from the same framework. What I would say is that of course, at the moment—

Q234 Chair: So the answer is no.

Chief Constable Gormley: The answer is maybe, Chairman, because we have inherited a position. There were eight legacy fleets because there were eight constabularies. We did not replace all of those cars at once. What I can’t generally answer for you is what the individual eight bespoke arrangements were.

Q235 Chair: But they’ve all gone now, and now you procure it yourself.

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes they have. We do procure it—my point is that you may see a different car in Kirkcaldy if it was procured by the force that Kirkcaldy lies in, as opposed to the one in which the other example you gave lies.

Chair: I’m not going to look for the differences, don’t worry. I just wanted a general view.

Chief Constable Gormley: The general view is—sorry Chair, I am not being flippant—as a national force going forward we will have one fleet and we can procure vehicles that are consistent from the same frameworks, which gives us the ability to deliver our national service.

Q236 Mr Winnick: We can agree, can we not Chief Constable, that we are all against brutality by Governments—our notion of human rights? We agree on that, don’t we?

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes.

Q237 Mr Winnick: And that it would be true to say that Police Scotland upholds the standards that one expects against such violations of human rights.

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes.

Q238 Mr Winnick: So you presumably know what I am coming to. Why is the Scottish police college being funded by various countries with appalling human rights records? Do you want me to name them? Presumably you know what I am talking about: Sri Lanka, South Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, countries that have undoubtedly carried out torture, brutality and violations, which Scottish parliamentarians would presumably be aghast at—at least I’d rather hope so.

Chief Constable Gormley: Well, what you are alluding to is our outreach work and our development with police services overseas. All of that is done with the full knowledge of the Scottish Government. It is done with the knowledge of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We are trying to improve standards of policing around the globe and also to learn from other organisations where relevant. So yes, we do international training, as does the College of Policing, and the countries in which we operate are with the full knowledge of the FCO, DFID and the Scottish Government.

Q239 Mr Winnick: Do I understand the position right: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had no objections, right?

Chief Constable Gormley: We would not go out and train without that—yes.

Q240 Mr Winnick: Yes; so that’s the FCO, which doesn’t particularly surprise me. What about the Scottish Government? Are they quite happy? Are the First Minister and her colleagues, Members of the Scottish Parliament, all quite happy with the situation?

Chief Constable Gormley: To my knowledge, no concerns have been expressed.

Q241 Mr Winnick: Nevertheless, Chief Constable, I don’t know about other colleagues, but I don’t understand how you can have contracts with Governments that are undoubtedly carrying out—not only in the past but at the present time—the sort of actions that I have already described. For example, I have information that, in the United Arab Emirates, two Britons arrested on drug charges were tortured—if they torture British citizens, one can imagine what they do to their own citizens—and Sudan has a notorious record of outright brutality. Leaving aside the politicians or the FCO—there is no doubt they are as much involved as the Scottish Government—don’t you, as Chief Constable, think there is a contradiction between this country upholding certain principles of human rights and the rest and an organisation like yours having contracts with Governments that act in totally the opposite direction?

Chief Constable Gormley: Well, clearly I am a public servant and there is a political dimension that is not part of my role. There are relationships with some of those Governments that you described. What we are trying to do when we go out and do training is raise the standards of policing in those environments. What we have been delivering out in the United Arab Emirates is child protection training and road collision investigation training. It is about trying to improve the standards of policing in those countries for those citizens.

I go back to my earlier answer: we are going out to countries with the full knowledge of the FCO and the Scottish Government. To my knowledge, certainly no concerns have been expressed to me thus far in terms of that.

Q242 Mr Winnick: So it is to raise standards in those countries and to show an example of what should be done—is that what you are telling us?

Chief Constable Gormley: Well, there are a number of reasons for which we would work abroad. Sometimes, foreign law enforcement and police services come to us—as I know they do to the college—for help, because actually the Scottish policing model and the British policing model are held in really high regard internationally. We have some of the highest standards of professional competence in the world. If a country is interested in how we better protect children and they come to us, presumably that is a sensible thing for us to do—in my view it certainly is.

Q243 Mr Winnick: It would be highly desirable if they did take action to protect children as well as adults. Chief Constable, you say this is to raise standards, and obviously that is the justification, but how do you go about ensuring that what is being undertaken under your capacity as Chief Constable in Scotland is followed through? Do any of your officers go to these countries and report back and say, “Well, fortunately, as a result of this, that and the other, some improvements have taken place”? Do you get reports?

Chief Constable Gormley: Ultimately it is for that country to determine whether it adopts the training. Scottish policing has not got an inspectorate capability around what the countries that we trained or passed information to in terms of how to raise standards have done with that. That is beyond our remit and certainly beyond our capacity. But if a foreign country comes to us and says, “We don’t know how to best protect children in child protection work. How do you do it in terms of your practice, knowledge, learning and ethos?” we will go and develop and deliver that, with the ambition that that improves policing in that country.

Q244 Mr Winnick: Can I ask about the mechanics? A foreign Government approaches Police Scotland and asks for assistance and there is a contract. What do you do then? Do you first contact the FCO and the Scottish Government? Is that the mechanics of going about the business?

Chief Constable Gormley: As far as I understand it, yes.

Q245 Mr Winnick: You say, “As far as I understand it,” but you must understand it because you are the Chief Constable.

Chief Constable Gormley: Of course the Chief Constable understands everything, and that is my understanding of it.

Q246 Mr Winnick: Do you see any contradiction between the repeated claims that are being spoken about at the moment on the Floor of the House of Commons on human rights—this aspect of the Queen’s Speech—with our commitment to human rights at every opportunity, whatever division there may be about whether we come out of the European convention on human rights, and our having contracts with Governments that, not to repeat myself, have such appalling records?

Chief Constable Gormley: I can only go back to my earlier answer. These are countries that we are permitted to engage with. That is the political position in which we operate. If we can improve policing and develop international best practice, then no, I don’t see a contradiction. Without specifically naming any of these countries, because I am not in a position to do that, if the experience of their citizens is that they get better policing as a result of either Police Scotland or the College of Policing training and reaching out to those officers, then I think that is probably good.

Mr Winnick: Without wishing to be personal in any way, I would sum it up in one word: hypocrisy.

Q247 Chair: If you have completed, Mr Winnick, let me clarify. You have a budget of what, Mr Gormley?

Chief Constable Gormley: For the whole of Police Scotland, about £1.1 billion.

Q248 Chair: About £1.1 billion. Are you under the same pressure? You should not feel hunted by these questions because we have put them to Alex Marshall as well, because they are of interest to the Committee. The difference in Alex Marshall’s case is that the Government have invited him to go and get work from abroad to try and supplement his budget, because he will only really get independence if he is financially independent. Your entire budget of £1.1 billion comes from the Scottish Government, does it?

Chief Constable Gormley: Yes.

Q249 Chair: How much of that money is actually raised by you? How much in addition is raised by you? There is an obligation on Alex Marshall to go out and seek these contracts. Do you feel similarly obliged to do this because you need the money in order to do your work?

Chief Constable Gormley: We are under significant budgetary pressure and therefore if we can legitimately raise revenue either in terms of cost recovery from sporting events or through delivery of training, either domestically in the UK or internationally, then we will seek to do it.

Q250 Chair: So out of your budget of £1.1 billion, how much of that relates to money that you have raised from doing work abroad?

Chief Constable Gormley: I don’t have those figures to hand, but I can certainly provide them.

Q251 Chair: If you could also write to us on the specific amounts that you raised from the contracts mentioned by Mr Winnick, that would be extremely helpful.

Chief Constable Gormley: If I am able to, I will.

Mr Winnick: And there is no personal element, again I emphasise.

Chief Constable Gormley: I didn’t take it that way, Mr Winnick. I understand where you’re coming from.

Q252 Chair: Right. So you will write to us with the information that we have asked for, and you are under no pressure to go out and do this work in the same way as Alex Marshall is, because you are someone who gets a full budget without any restrictions.

Chief Constable Gormley: I don’t know what pressure Alex is under, and I am not dissenting from that—

Q253 Chair: He is under pressure to become independent.

Chief Constable Gormley: No, I am not under pressure to become a self-funding financially independent institution. That is very different from where I am.

Q254 Chair: And just to clarify, this Committee in previous reports has encouraged the police service in England and Wales—not Police Scotland, because it is not in our remit—to go out and talk about British policing as a whole, if we can call it that just for a moment. The point Mr Winnick was making was what checks are made on the Governments that you do business with? We accept that you do very good work as far as road collisions and child protection work are concerned. Do you think that that is your responsibility or do you think that is the responsibility of the Scottish Government or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office? If they say, “Go and do this work”, you do not second-guess their endorsement; it is not your job to.

Chief Constable Gormley: I have not been confronted with that set of circumstances. I don’t think I would, no. But I will write to you to clarify the precise arrangements that exist.

Chair: That would be extremely helpful.

Q255 Stuart C. McDonald: Just a quick question that arises from what you say about the budgetary pressure that you face. How helpful would it be to Police Scotland if, like all other police forces in the United Kingdom, you were able to recover VAT from the Treasury?

Chief Constable Gormley: That would be quite helpful.

Q256 Stuart C. McDonald: What sum are we talking about?

Chief Constable Gormley: Again, I would need to come back with that detail for you, Mr McDonald, but clearly it is 20%. For everything that we purchase, we are not able to recover that VAT. I don’t know if my colleague behind me has that figure, but it is substantial.

Q257 Tim Loughton: To follow up with a rather slanted question, can you confirm that you do not perform services, training or otherwise, in any of those countries to which Mr Winnick has alluded—and more—that would be deemed illegal in the UK?

Chief Constable Gormley: Absolutely.

Q258 Tim Loughton: Have you turned down any advances to provide services on the basis that you are uncomfortable about their legality or morality?

Chief Constable Gormley: I haven’t personally in the last four months, but there may be examples in the three years of Police Scotland. If there are, I am happy to provide them.

Q259 Tim Loughton: It would be interesting to know if they have been. Have you or your predecessor been approached to provide services that the FCO has effectively vetoed?

Chief Constable Gormley: I don’t know. I haven’t personally, but, again, I can try and establish that for you.

Q260 Tim Loughton: And on something like child safeguarding, I hope we would all agree we have a good deal of expertise in this country, which could certainly be of use to other countries around the world. However, we also have a lot of pending historical cases, which are putting great pressures on the police to investigate at the moment. If you are effectively contracting out some of your manpower with expertise in child safeguarding to other countries, is there a detrimental effect for the rate at which you are able to deal with what we are told are 70,000 historic child sex abuse cases likely to come before the police across the United Kingdom this year, with half of the court time at the moment being taken up by sex abuse cases as well? Can you afford the manpower to contract them out?

Chief Constable Gormley: The answer is yes, and we wouldn’t compromise our ability to deliver at home in order to make relatively modest amounts of money abroad. Again, I wouldn’t want to overstate this, but I think there is something about developing the capabilities domestically—because we are increasingly seeing child abuse, particularly online, becoming an international problem—and improving other law enforcement and police organisations’ knowledge of how to deal with it, because that demand pushes demand into us as it is a connected system, particularly around the exchange of illegal images of the children online.

The short answer is that we wouldn’t deploy abroad to train to the detriment of our ability to deal with what we need to deal with internally. But there is a broader point about improving—I don’t mean to make this sound very grand—the international capabilities to deal with problems that will have an effect both in the country of origin and in Scotland or in England and Wales.

Q261 Tim Loughton: Sure, but the choice of those countries—on the face of it, they are not countries that are primary providers of child abusers or child abuse images taking place in that country. I find it slightly difficult to square the circle, in that you are pitching for business to advise on child safeguarding in countries that are not at the forefront of child abuse abroad. As such, this is not actually going to help the job of your officers who stay in Scotland to tackle ongoing child safeguarding, or those officers when they come back. It’s a mutual learning exercise you are trying—

Chief Constable Gormley: Again, there are two or three reasons why we would deploy abroad. Sometimes it is to learn, sometimes it’s to teach, sometimes it’s to develop relationships that we then need because we need flows of intelligence and information to be exchanged. I’m going to alight it on the UAE because Mr Winnick clearly has very deeply-held views around that. What have we done in the UAE? We have done road collision investigation training and some child protection training. That is what we have done. In terms of the fine detail behind that, I don’t have that as I sit here. But the broader point around why we would want to deploy abroad, either in an English and Welsh context or a Scottish one, to improve the international ability to understand and deal with child abuse or any of those other international threats that can have implications for us domestically, that is why we will want to do it. There will be a range of reasons.

Q262 Tim Loughton: Okay. Finally, are you satisfied that your governance procedures are such? What preparation and training do your officers going out to UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka or wherever have if, as part of their duty, they were privy to activity by those police that would be deemed illegal if it were to happen in this country? What are the protocols for reporting that and that perhaps leading to withdrawing those services. How is that governed?

Chief Constable Gormley: Well, they would come back and report on what they had experienced when they were abroad. We would debrief them and if that was an issue, we would take a view about what we needed to do in terms of a relationship ongoing with that country.

Q263 Victoria Atkins: Women currently account for 29% of Scotland’s police force and yet, there are many more women in society as a whole. What are you doing to try and encourage women to apply to your service, but also to retain them when you have recruited them?

Chief Constable Gormley: We have a number of diversity challenges: women and black and minority ethnic officers. The situation we are in is not one I want to remain in. At the moment, at the top of my organisation, I have two women assistant chief constables and one woman deputy chief constable. Those two women assistant chief constables are retiring this year. We have gone out for replacements, and no further women came forward. We have a significant challenge in terms of progression—not so much in recruitment. The level of female officers, as against male officers, who are coming in at the entry point of the organisation is much healthier, but we don’t get the progression through the ranks that I would want to see.

We are about to embark on the first substantive round of promotions for chief inspectors, superintendents and chief superintendents—I am not sure since Police Scotland started, but certainly it is the first in the last two years. We are doing all we can to make sure that that set of promotions is as inclusive as it needs to be. Because of the numbers we are going to promote, we are going to set the complexion of the organisation for a period of time. We have a Scottish association for women police officers and a range of measures to try to enable women to fulfil their potential within the organisation—

Q264 Victoria Atkins: Sorry to cut across, but you said you have had no female applicants to the position of assistant chief constable. That is worrying.

Chief Constable Gormley: It is, and it is a reflection of the fact that the gateway for this is the strategic command course. Every Scottish chief officer goes through the same selection and training process as any other chief officer in England and Wales. That is one of the points where we are still very joined. I do not remember the exact number of women who qualified this year, but it was low, and it continues to be not where it needs to be. We can only, in Scotland or anywhere else, draw from the pool of people who put themselves forward.

There are other challenges for us as a national force. People have complicated lives, and uprooting from England or Wales to Scotland is quite a big ask, particularly if you have caring responsibilities or a partner who works. One of the issues for me—I have been talking to George Hamilton, the chief of PSNI, about this—is that as single national forces, which effectively the PSNI is, we do not have immediate neighbours where we can easily port people in from. How do we develop careers in a meaningful way? I absolutely recognise that diversity in all its forms, in terms of both recruitment and then progression, is an issue we need to make progress on. It is not where we wanted to be.

Q265 Victoria Atkins: On the issue of ethnic diversity, only 1% of the Police Scotland workforce comes from an ethnic minority background, compared with 4% of the population. Again, more work needs to be done on that.

Chief Constable Gormley: Absolutely. We have a positive action recruitment team that has been developed in the last six or so months. It is doing a lot of work with the communities that we would want to see coming forward and joining Police Scotland. It is an area that concerns me.

Q266 Chair: We are nearly at the end, Mr Gormley. We are going to take evidence now from the National Crime Agency, which, as you know, succeeded the Serious Organised Crime Agency. What do you think went wrong with SOCA?

Chief Constable Gormley: That is a very loaded question, Chairman. I can tell you what opportunity I think the NCA presents, which is to take what was principally a drugs agenda and develop a much more coherent response to all organised crime in all its forms. One of the issues with SOCA is that it became quite introspective, and it looked and felt from a police perspective—which is how I looked at it at the time—closer to an intelligence agency than a police force. It did not do enough in terms of its visibility and relevance to people like me in the jobs I used to have.

One of the things we attempted to do in the National Crime Agency was to very much change that culture, to be more open and more transparent, to have a much more engaged relationship with policing and to have a much broader mission, which was across all serious and organised crime types, rather than what became a fairly narrow focus on drugs and, to a lesser extent, guns. This Committee will be well versed in the breadth of serious and organised crime threats in the world we are moving into.

Q267 Chair: One of the issues, of course, is the amount of money being laundered through the City of London. You have Edinburgh in your patch. Do you have concerns about the proceeds of crime being laundered through that huge financial centre and ending up in other parts of Scotland?

Chief Constable Gormley: I do not have specific concerns, but on the general point, yes—in terms of the credibility of the country and the UK, we need to make sure that any centre of financial dealing is not a centre of money laundering and that it has an international reputation that encourages investment and businesses to locate themselves there.

Q268 Chair: I am afraid my final question is a little personal, unlike Mr Winnick’s question. The Committee has had a long-standing interest in the issue of chief officers retiring from jobs, getting retirement packages and then getting other jobs while drawing their pensions. We were very surprised when you retired from the Serious Organised Crime Agency and suddenly appeared as the Chief Constable of Scotland. Looking through the figures, when you were last chief constable of Norfolk, you had a total package of £261,981, which made you the highest-paid chief officer apart from the commissioner. At the moment, are you drawing a pension from your previous English jobs while being Chief Constable of Scotland?

Chief Constable Gormley: No.

Chair: Excellent. Thank you very much for coming.

Oral evidence: College of Policing, HC 23 4